Lee Child was born in Coventry but moved to Birmingham in the hope of a better education. I wasn’t born in Coventry but was educated there, so this is by way of giving the man his due.

You’ll have heard that he writes the slow bits fast and the fast bits slow; it’s true, and he’s very good at it. I suspect it’s harder than it looks. One would have to try it to find out.

His stroke of genius is making his hero a retired military policeman. I knew that there were such things, because six Royal Military Police were killed during the Iraq War, but I had only a vague idea of what they did. And Reacher’s having been one solves all sorts of problems. He finds trouble because he knows where to look for it, which he is inclined to do as an ordinary soldier might not be. He can come across any kind of weaponry and know how to use it as a private detective couldn’t. And he fucks with the rules as a policeman, however maverick, wouldn’t.

I don’t know about the whole knight errant thing. Having him move around the place, free of tie, is certainly handy. He’s a humourless man, as, I rather suspect, is Child. I don’t really buy the savant-level numeracy. His feminism, I suspect, would dissolve on minimal analysis.

The plots are pretty good in the best ones, and mostly not bad in the less good ones. There always is a plot, I’m glad to say. A few are ludicrous, though. The sex scenes are at least as awful as they invariably are, and a lot more unnecessary.

And it will sound like posturing, but the ones Andrew Child (partly) wrote really are rubbish.